Why Can't Felons Vote?

A troubling story that has not gotten much attention this election season  or any recent one, for that matter  is why a certain group of roughly
5.3 million Americans won't be allowed to vote. It isn't because they're
underage or non-citizens or mentally incompetent. It isn't because they're
unregistered or physically unable to get to the polls. It isn't even because
they're limping around with a chronic case of political apathy.

Oh, well. Felons, you say. They're criminals, for Pete's sake. Of course
they shouldn't have the right to vote. But why is that, exactly?

In places like Mississippi, one of 12 states that permanently bar at least
some felons from voting, the reason typically involves the notion that
people have displayed very bad judgment by committing a felony, by
definition a serious crime. No argument there. But having done so, the
thinking goes, they have also proven themselves unfit to make one of life's
most important decisions: choosing the nation's leaders. As Roger Clegg,
president of the conservative advocacy group Center for Equal Opportunity,
neatly puts it, "If you aren't willing to follow the law, you can't claim
the right to make the law for everyone else."

Officials in Mississippi are so taken with this slogan that they recently
piled 11 disqualifying felonies onto the 10 listed in their state's
constitution. The Mississippi attorney general said they could do so without
actually amending the constitution, based on his creative reading of a 1998
federal court decision, but the American Civil Liberties Union disagreed. On Oct. 9, it filed a
lawsuit in Hinds County, Mississippi, challenging the 11 additions,
including shoplifting and timber larceny, as improperly adopted.

Notice that the ACLU didn't challenge the 10 felonies already in the state
constitution. That's because it is generally legal for states to
disenfranchise felons  the U.S. Constitution says so. (OK, not in so many
words, but that's how the Supreme Court reads section two of the 14th Amendment.) Forty-eight states prohibit current inmates from voting, 36 keep
parolees from the polls, 31 exclude probationers, and only two  Vermont and
Maine  allow inmates to vote, according to the Sentencing Project, a liberal
advocacy group in Washington, D.C.

I can't get worked up about the inmate vote, since prisoners haven't yet
done their time and are temporarily estranged from their political
communities. But there is at least one good argument for granting the vote
to the almost 4 million felons who are out of prison, and her name is Leola
Strickland, of Hinds County, Mississippi.

In 2001, Strickland postdated three checks of between $90 and $500, and then
for unrelated reasons lost her job as an administrative assistant. By the
time she got a new job several years later, the checks had bounced. Bad
judgment? You bet. So she was hauled into court this year and, in exchange
for pleading guilty to a felony and making good on the checks, allowed to
stay out of prison. Now Strickland is working and paying her bills and
taxes, and she wants to vote. "I always voted," she says. "My vote may be
the one that counts to get the right person in office. It may be foolish of
me to think like that, but that's how I feel."

The feelings of a felon don't matter much in Mississippi, at least when it
comes to voting, and that's unfortunate. If someone wants to vote, to in
effect play by the rules, doesn't it make sense to encourage that person, to
put a collective arm around her and say something like, Let's go give those
numbskulls in Congress a piece of our mind? Wouldn't that make a past
transgressor feel as if she had a stake in the system? Of course it would.
In fact, a Sentencing Project study that tracked released felons from 1997
through 2000 found that those who voted were less than half as likely to be
rearrested as those who did not  or could not  vote.

And don't fall for the line that the nation's original plan called for
denying felons the vote. In 1800, no state prohibited felons from voting. On
the eve of the Civil War, 80% of the states did, largely to block
African Americans, who though rarely allowed to vote were disproportionately
represented among felons. Today, the impact of these laws still falls
disproportionately on poor, minority males, a fact that seems to have skewed
more than a few elections. Anyone familiar with the details of the
deadlocked 2000 presidential race will recall that tens of thousands of
likely Democratic voters were disenfranchised because of Florida's laws
against voting by felons. A relative handful could have made Al Gore
president.

So here's the thing: Felons who are out of prison have largely served the
punishment prescribed by the judicial system. Shouldn't that be enough?
Penalizing them further by taking away their right to vote is not just
unfair to them, it's bad for us. We'll be lucky if 40% of eligible
voters cast a ballot on Nov. 7. What kind of a democracy is that?

We should be finding ways to get more voters to the polls, not looking for
excuses to keep them away. So instead of prohibiting felons from voting,
let's require them to do it. That way, they will continue to repay their
debt to society, long after they walk out of prison.